1. Michelle Leon, I Live Inside—Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland (Minnesota Historical Society) Guitarist and lead singer Kat Bjelland was a heroin addict; drummer Lori Barbero was organized, frugal, and drove the van; bassist Michelle Leon was a nice Jewish girl from a professional family who gave up college for another life, though she never gave up Minnesota nice. When Babes in Toyland took shape in Minneapolis in 1987 they were as sulfurous as any punk band the form, the idea, has ever produced—compared to them the Seattle bands of the time were the Dave Clark Five. You can hear that on their first album, Spanking Machine, which came out in 1990; you can hear it even more on a YouTube video of their April 14, 1988 show at the Cabooze Bar in Minneapolis—eight-and-a-half minutes in, Leon sings the unrecorded “Milk Pond” with a pleased smile on her face, as if she’s gotten away with something. She left the group in 1992, having, you get the feeling, lived a hundred lives as part of it, none of them finished, which may be why there isn’t an obvious sentence in the book. Over a little more than 200 pages, Leon’s short, self-contained chapters, often less than a page, are the opposite of diary entries: considered, honed, until every word has its own reason for being where it is.

There are triumphs and misery, but no self-praise, no self-pity. Humor is deadpan. After an accident in Arizona the band buys a new van: “a brown two-tone Ford Econoline with real backseats from a car rental place in Phoenix. The seller tells us the vehicle was owned by a woman who was kidnapped and is currently missing. He gives us a good deal.” The British rock writer Everett True “asks a riveting question: ‘What’s it like to be girls in a band?’ Lori kids that we get our periods at the same time.” Along with the day-to-day facts of life for an unknown band playing any out-of-town show they can get—sleeping on floors, not eating, making just enough to make it to the next town, common experiences never put down with more simple, direct conviction—you are brought into the sense of impersonation that comes with even home-town fame. This is “Everyone,” the whole chapter: “People recognize me out at shows, or shopping for groceries, at the movies, in line at the post office. Everyone acts extra friendly, buying drinks and introducing themselves. I am not sure who is for real, if someone is really interested or just wanting in on the scene. All the attention gives me a false sense of self-worth, illusive and distorted, with the ability to vanish like melting snow. I define myself through the gaze of strangers and I have never felt so phony. I have never felt so whole. I am disconnected, capable of caring very little, especially about those who are the closest to me. I am losing myself but it doesn’t matter. Boys think I’m foxy and want to make out. Girls want to be my friend; they also try to make out with me. Everyone thinks I’m really great.”

The deepest moment in the book, one that any good novelist would recognize in an instant as the crux of the story, comes out of the most ordinary incident, when Leon and Bjelland take Barbero’s no to mean no when it means yes—We’re going to the music store, do you want us to get you anything?—andthe comradeship between the three women begins to unravel—You knew I needed new sticks! “I look right at her and she looks right back at me, the fire of anger in our eyes. So begins resentment that lasts for weeks.” “I want to be warm and kind and open to everyone, like Lori,” Leon says a page later, maybe a month later, maybe two, after watching Barbero in a club, “so charming to strangers that all of her goodness gets used up, and there is nothing left but her husk, and then she is such a total fucking bitch to me and Kat. Take a deep breath. We all have our struggles. But I still hate her! Let it go. But I asked if she wanted anything at the music store and she said no! Let it go.” It’s not really a surprise, after this, that the life Leon lives afterthe band is no less rich, not an incident predictable, not an ending preordained.

3. David Reid, The Brazen Age—New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia(Pantheon) There is no depth in this 500-page account of the immediate postwar period, centered on 1948, one of the most fascinating years in American history. But there is one immediately striking photo among the images you can find anywhere else, revealing contours of bohemia Reid’s text doesn’t touch: six people at a table in the San Remo Café in Greenwich Village, one unidentified man looking at the camera, two women seen from behind, and, as captioned, the actor Montgomery Clift (Red River, A Place in the Sun, name-dropped by Reid once), the actor Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a beat critique if there ever was one, not mentioned), and Jack Kerouac. What were they talking about? Casting On the Road? Clift as Sal Paradise, McCarthy as Dean Moriarty? Except it’s not Jack Kerouac.

4. and 5. Ted Hearne, composer, But I Voted for Shirley Chisholm, and Libby Larsen, composer, Ferlinghetti, Aspen Music Festival (August 13) Hearne was born in 1982; 10 years before that, Shirley Chisholm, congresswoman from Brooklyn, was the first African-American from the Democratic or Republican party to run for president, and 15 years after that, in 1987, Biz Markie, in “Nobody Beats the Biz,” gave Chisholm a rap wave she must have treasured until her death in 2005: “Reagan is the pres but I voted for Shirley Chisholm.” Like many hip-hop artists before him, Hearne starts with that sample, and then, with the sound of ear-splitting feedback from Seohee Min’s violin and god knows what else, the 12-member Aspen Contemporary Ensemble jerked the piece to clanging life. With the original Chisholm shout subsumed into a call-and-response of city sounds—honking horns, pneumatic drills, or gunshots—and the stuttering rhythms of the group, with drummer Hannah Weaver acting it all out in the back, you couldn’t tell if you were listening to Markie or Andrew Heath’s trumpet and Harry Gonzalez’s trombone. It was only steps away from the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 “Summer in the City,” but those steps were slippery enough to let the music turn jittery, almost to the point of breaking—until it slipped away into an idle that called up Miles Davis’ 1960 Sketches of Spain. It was only seven minutes, and so fast on its own switchbacks you wanted to hear it again, right away.

Larsen was born in 1950; she read Ferlinghetti’s 1958 beat-poetry best-seller in high school, and went back to compose to it just two years ago. There are six short pieces, keyed to Ferlinghetti lines that never resonated that strongly in the first place (“Crazy to be alive in such a strange world”) and don’t now. The players were riveting to watch: the straight man, James Dunham, viola, looked to be six-foot-six (“a pyramid,” said one person in the audience) and never cracked a smile or a frown; the exuberant Juan Gabriel Olivares, clarinet, a head or two shorter, was all Stan Laurel to Dunham’s Oliver Hardy; and Tengku Irfan, piano, who compared to the others looked like a windup-toy brought in when the scheduled pianist took a powder. The compositions were coy satires on the American scene, and the performances became less substantial one after the other, until “...fifty-one clowns in back all wearing nothing but Stars & Stripes,” which despite its characteristically condescending title immediately took off, with all sorts of patriotic airs floating through sounds that were pushing toward an abstract reworking of Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock deconstruction of the national anthem. They made it right to the blazing heart of the history Hendrix made all those years ago, and you couldn’t tell if you were in a country that had ceased to be or remained to be made. Irfan had earlier used an elbow on the keys; now he stood up from his piano bench like Jerry Lee Lewis and pounded across any shaped melody, any definite beat. When the three bowed, you knew he’dbeen somewhere.

6. Felice Brothers, Life in the Dark (Yep Roc) The casual, sliding rhythms in Ian Felice’s voice don’t wear out because they’re filled with regret. That feeling doubles back on itself, leading to the band’s startlingly empathetic rewrites of such traditional ballads—you could say traditional murders—as “Stagger Lee” (Lee “Stag” Shelton shoots Billy Lyons in St. Louis, 1895) and “Frankie and Albert” (Frankie Baker shoots Albert Britt in St. Louis, 1899). As the Felice Brothers tell the tales in “Dream On” and “Frankie’s Gun!” they’re taking place in the present and the singer is in the songs, thinking it all over. That’s what regret is all about: what could have happened if just one thing had been just slightly different, if you woke up an hour later, if you hadn’t taken what someone said for what it probably didn’t mean anyway. And now you can never take it back.

You can hear that small drama almost anywhere on this album, and especially in the first lines of “Aerosol Ball,” the first song here: they’re so quietly absurd, with accordion and fiddle swaying in the background (“The rain in Maine/Is made of novocaine/In the Florida Keys/It’s made of Antifreeze/In Maryland/It’s made of heroin/In Minnesota/It’s made of baking soda”) you want the song to keep going until it covers the other 46. You don’t even have to notice when the tune turns into third-hand social critique by way of a put-down of “the doll of St. Paul.” “Her dreams her thoughts are made by Microsoft,” Ian Felice sings, without changing his tone, and lines seem just as made up on the spot as the ones the he started with. The more the band try to be serious—and they really are, as another line from “Aerosol Ball” goes, “looking for a mix of sex and politics”)—the more they day-dream, conjuring up melodies and phrases, unable to stick to the script, letting their music play itself.

7. Columbia film professor Andy Bienen on the first night of the Democratic convention (email, July 25) “It was strange on the 51st anniversary of Newport to hear all that self-righteous booing. Superficial differences aside, the Sanders crowd seemed cut from the same sanctimonious cloth as those who booed Dylan in ’65 and ’66. It seemed possible that some of the older delegates could even have been at Newport booing then as they were booing now.”

8. Laurie Penny, “I’m with the Banned,” on the Republican convention (medium.com, July 21) Reading Penny, who writes for the Guardian and the New Statesman and on her own blog,is not like reading any American political writer, no matter how passionate (Timothy Eagan), funny (Gail Collins), inflamed (Matt Taibbi), or apocalyptic (Jonathan Chait). She’s faster, tougher, and she writes as if words were made for her. Her clever writing (“America is a nation eaten by its own myth”) is never merely clever; ideas (“The entire idea of America is about believing impossible things. Nobody said those things had to be benign”) explode out of it. Here she’s at “the gayest neo-fascist rally” at the Republican convention, starring the troll Milo Yiannopoulos, just banned from Twitter for his racist abuse of Leslie Jones, and reveling in it. Beyond the photos of naked men in Trump hats that cover the walls of the venue is the VIP room, where Penny meets Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Party for Freedom: “the most obviously disturbed member of the neo-right suicide squad in attendance. He cannot finish a sentence. His voice drifts, and he trails away, already out of the room. There is a dustbin fire behind the blank eyes of his human suit.” “Milo Yiannopoulos is the ideological analogue of Kim Kardashian’s rear end,” Penny has already written, and as she goes on that sentence sounds all through her report, translating everything she sees: “Wilders is a less polished, wholly charmless rendition of the neo-right demagogue character creation sheet that gave us Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. These people do not have personalities, they have haircuts.”

9. DJ Shadow, The Mountain Will Fall (Mass Appeal) For the great sampler of bits and pieces of dislocation in modern life—finding yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and realizing you were born there—the textures can seem meretricious, accepting, as if there’s really nothing left to argue against. But as the record summons a movie-music sense of phony peace of mind in its last 10 minutes or so, all of that begins to break down. By the end, yes—you don’t know where you are.

10. A friend writes in (August 4) “Last night we were at the WH for Obama’s birthday party. I finally met Paul McCartney, which had been a dream of mine. I tried to act cool about it but secretly I was like one of the Beatlemania girls at Shea screaming on the inside.”